The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

  On the walk back across the warm, gritty city, Claire said, “I asked Alysse about Mother and McCully. Like you wanted me to. She’s not very interested in Mother and she didn’t really know Father very well, but she did tell me one story. It’s a little upsetting. Do you want to hear it? I don’t want you to freak out or anything.”

  “Are you crazy, Claire?”

  “Well,” said Claire slowly. “That summer when they came on the boat, they were incredibly bored at night, not Mother and Father, of course, who were used to quiet nights, but Alysse and her friends were dying of boredom, especially as we ate dinner at six o’clock, so they organized games after we went to bed. And in one of the games a man was blindfolded and the women lifted up their skirts and the man felt all the legs until he identified his partner’s legs.”

  “Mary and McCully played, too?” She was a little surprised.

  “Of course. Apparently, they really began to look forward to the games each night.”

  “And what happened?” Mamie asked nervously.

  “Well, in the leg game, which they played often because no one was very good at Dictionary, all the men were able to recognize their partner’s legs by touch, except McCully. He could never do it. And the game always ended with some man pissed off when Father insisted some other woman’s legs were Mother’s.”

  Claire stopped to look at Mamie. Mamie was silent, so Claire was not certain she had understood the game. It was hard to explain.

  “The men on their knees blindfolded, the men, and they had to creep along feeling all these legs until they found the right legs. You see—”

  “It is the saddest thing I ever heard,” said Mamie

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you!” Claire stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, and several visibly annoyed people had to walk around her.

  “It makes sense, in a way,” said Mamie. She took Claire’s arm and pulled her along. “Why did Alysse tell you?”

  “She thought it was unbelievably funny.”

  Poor, dear McCully, thought Mamie. “I hate Alysse.”

  “It’s not that Alysse doesn’t like men,” Claire said. “They’re just not a political issue. They’re jobs. Work. And if you’re any good at what you do, as I suppose she is, you’re promoted. You get to marry one richer and more powerful. She thinks that she adores men.”

  “I know,” said Mamie. She sighed. “I don’t think she likes sex much, either. I suppose it’s part of the job, as you say. No speed-typing, but speed hand jobs.”

  “That reminds me, do you remember Mr. Hemmings at school?”

  “Oh, no,” said Mamie. “I’m not sure I want to hear this. I’ve reached my daily level of sexual humiliation with the McCully story. My weekly level, actually.”

  When Claire shrugged and was silent, Mamie looked over at her.

  “Okay,” Mamie said.

  “He wanted me to meet him in the science lab for some experiments. Something to do with the effect of hot and cold on the male organ. Ice and—”

  “I changed my mind,” Mamie said quickly. Although she was laughing, she put her hands over her ears.

  “Oh, Mamie! You’re no fun!”

  “You’re my sister. My little sister. It shocks me. And it makes me sad. I don’t know why it does, but it does.”

  “But it was funny, Mamie! How can it make you sad?”

  “It’s all so desperate,” Mamie said. “There is something awful about McCully on his knees with those city slickers, running his hands up some grisly alcoholic leg and thinking it was Mother’s. And there is something awful about a chemistry teacher in a toupee trying to get you to put ice on his balls. I know you say it’s about pleasure and that that’s what counts, it doesn’t matter if Orval goes down on you, or Sherry, or Jimmy; it’s only about pleasure, the body-as-machine, I understand that. It’s all biological and hormonal, anyway, even for Aunt Alice. Aunt Alice is looking for a man to take care of her because she is a woman. She is helpless and she needs food and shelter. It’s just not so simple for me. I told you: you’re the modern woman. You’re the future; I’m the past. And even though my clitoris is pumping away, as you say, it would make a difference who was going down on me, a man, a man whom I had chosen, or a mongoose.” She ran into the street and stuck out her arm for a taxi.

  “I told you you’d freak out,” Claire yelled after her. “I told you!”

  Mamie listened to her Hawaiian tapes on her Walkman when she walked to work. Alysse had asked that Mamie not play them in the living room. Alysse had grown quite fond of the other music, Otis Redding and Clifton Chenier and Aretha, that Claire and Mamie played for her. She did ask if the girls thought they listened to “you know, non-white” music because of their background.

  “Our background?” Mamie asked in irritation. “With the slaves, you mean?”

  “I loathed Hawai‘i,” Alysse said. “Loathed. A lot of lizards and no swimming pools. And nothing to buy.”

  Even Claire, Mamie noticed, had grown a little weary of her playing over and over in their bedroom the cassettes of old Hawaiian music and chants. Mamie tried to talk to Claire about the longing she had for the islands. “Lily has it, too,” Mamie said. “She has it so much, she can’t even live there.”

  “Oh, Mamie,” Claire said, sighing. “You exaggerate everything. Lily is a very odd person.”

  “One day, I’m worried about the extinction of the nene goose, and then the next day it’s the United States Army using Kaho‘olawe for mortar practice. Then old Mrs. Robinson admits they’re selling a thousand acres to a Texas hotel chain because of bad government sugar policies. The whole planet seems to be sliding away. Lily sees it, although she, of course, has been convinced by her father that the world has already ended.”

  “Then what does it matter?”

  “Because of the waste of it. The carelessness of it.”

  Claire started to speak, but Mamie interrupted her. “I’ve heard the argument that it really doesn’t make much difference if the last person who speaks Hawaiian dies tomorrow, but I don’t believe it.”

  “You’re just homesick, Mamie,” Claire said and went back to watching “Magnum.”

  So, except in her letters to Lily, Mamie kept quiet about these things and listened to the sweet, intricate patterns of Gabby Pahinui’s slack-key guitar in the privacy of the dingy streets.

  Years earlier, on those afternoons when the other girls at school had been at cheerleading practice, she and Lily Shields were in dusty shops in Chinatown using their small allowances to make payments on old bamboo nose flutes and sharkskin hymnals. Lily’s father was a collector and some of the dealers recognized Lily and gave them little things, pieces of quilt appliqué and nineteenth-century hand combs of stippled coconut and mother-of-pearl. One summer, the girls displayed their collection in the garage at Waimea and charged a small admission. There were not many visitors, although Mamie induced some old cowboys down from the ranch to see the display of two lau hala hats and pheasant-feather lei. Lily’s father, who was very encouraging of this sort of thing, came to their museum several times that summer and he presented them with a rare pa-ipu heke ’ole, a gourd dance drum, to place alongside the lone calabash of McCully’s that had escaped the pull of the tsunami.

  Perhaps Mamie was trying to rebuild McCully’s extraordinary collection. She was ever after drawn and held by dying traditions. It suited her romanticism and her melancholy. She wondered if she had been born too late. She saw something fanciful and foolhardy in a belief in the future. The myths and music of her island, Kaua‘i, disappearing so very quickly, had a strong effect on Mamie. She once begged an old, wary Hawaiian woman in Ha‘ena to teach her the words to the ancient place-name chants and songs and she had written down the words in order to memorize them and in times of great loneliness, and even fear, Mamie would find these words, learned years earlier, moving through her like a stream, and the words steadied her and restored her: “If you can only see the beauty of the sparkli
ng water. The fragrant hala of Mapuana seems to reach out to the restless sea. This is the end of my praise, of beautiful Kaua‘i in the calm.”

  Mamie saw no incongruity in this. It did not seem eccentric to be walking up Fifty-sixth Street, under the shining steel frame of a new skyscraper, listening to a name-chant sung by Wahinekeaouli Pa about the moss on the beach at Polihale. She was amused by the shouts of the construction workers (it was where she first heard the request to “sit on my face”) and they made her feel both desirable and guilty, as if she were beautiful and betraying those values of the Women’s Movement that her friend Sherry Alden had explained to her when they used to talk all night long. The construction workers reminded her of the boys in the camp, even though some of these workers were white city boys. She would have been ashamed to admit it, but she often walked past the huge, clanging building site just because the men made her laugh.

  She was in a dressing room at Deardorf’s, shaking out a soiled jumpsuit (mustard and mayonnaise, she guessed) and she had just decided that she wasn’t going to help Selena to steal any longer, when Miss Magda sternly called her to the back.

  Mamie, understandably nervous, was confused to find Miss Magda waiting for her with Mr. Felix, the designer. Mamie had first met Mr. Felix several weeks earlier when he had asked her, with great charm, to assist him before a fashion show on the third floor. He had come to the lingerie department to borrow brassieres for several of the models who had shown up without them. “My customers are not the sort to go without support,” he said to Mamie as if they were old friends. He winked to make sure that she knew it was a Mr. Felix witticism. He looked at her rather curiously at the time, but Mamie, wearing away under the constant pressure of Selena’s derision, thought it must have been the rare Duke Kahana-moku shirt she had on that day.

  Mr. Felix, despite his name and occupation, was not effete. Mamie knew this, but it would never have occurred to her that his study of her might have been admiring. She was, therefore, as amazed as Miss Magda when Felix announced that he had asked Mr. Deardorf if Mamie could be released temporarily from the lingerie department in order to work for him.

  “For you?” she asked Felix.

  It seemed to be a matter already decided. Miss Magda, with a scornful expression, turned away. I will be very happy never to see another hanger, Mamie thought. Or another woman.

  “Of course, my dear,” Felix said. “For whom else?” He had shiny black hair and small black eyes. He had a thin, well-trimmed moustache. Mamie had noticed before that he had exceedingly good manners, in that deferential, graceful way of European men. She thought that the boys in the camp would envy the slick pomade used by Mr. Felix. It did not smell like Lilac Vegetol.

  “I should like to see you in one of my dresses,” he said as he took her elbow and smoothly guided her away from the lingerie department. “I have you just on the loan, you know. Should you be unhappy, Mr. Deardorf assures you of your position here. I like to think, however, that you will be too happy to ever leave me.” He smiled.

  He took her down to the couture, never letting go of her arm, finding a way to touch her or brush against her whenever he could do so without making her wary or nervous. With some women, it would not matter if they noticed; in fact, it often worked to his advantage by speeding things along, but he sensed that with this girl, at least, he must move slowly.

  “There is a fashion show next month in Chicago. I want you to be there.”

  She looked at him, startled.

  “I will take care of everything. It is very, very simple. I have a special dress in mind for you. Now take this and we will see.”

  He picked a low-cut, black silk jersey sheath from the rack of his sample clothes and took her into a large dressing room. He closed the door behind them.

  Mamie saw at once that he meant for her to remove her clothes. She had never undressed before a man, in the day, in the light. When she had made love with Tommy Sheehan in college, it had been a matter of jeans and white cotton underpants removed quickly, not from passion, but from embarrassment, in dark dormitory rooms or stuffy motel rooms. She had undressed awkwardly in closets and dirty bathrooms, reappearing shyly in a thin towel, and raced for the bed.

  Felix, careful not to look her in the face and frighten her, unbuttoned the sample dress. He held it open for her, waiting.

  She knew from the time when he came with his models to fit them with brassieres that the girls were not bothered by modesty. They stood expressionlessly before Felix, and even Mamie herself, a stranger, in their bikini panties, and tried on brassieres without shyness, or even interest. Mamie had been impressed. Their thin, long bodies were like the bodies of young boys, without breasts or hips, but oddly appealing in their lean, trim solidity and cleanness of line.

  Mamie, whose body was not that of a young boy, did not understand that her womanliness, her full, pretty breasts and her long torso with its small sloping waist and hips, was just what made it difficult for her to show her body. Her womanliness, and sensuousness, gave her an unconscious humility. In some way, she realized the power implicit in a woman’s body, in her body, and she was afraid and ashamed of that power.

  She so wanted to do the right thing. She wanted to show this cultivated older man that she knew how to behave. It never occurred to her that she might simply have asked him to wait outside.

  He did not let her see that he was aroused. He patiently held the weightless dress in his outstretched hand. She saw that the backs of his hands were marked with brown liver spots.

  She slipped off her flat shoes. She was not wearing stockings, now that it was warm. She unbuttoned her linen skirt and stepped out of it. She folded it slowly and neatly and laid it carefully on a narrow ledge in the corner.

  She looked up and saw in the large mirrors that he was looking strangely at her slip. It was Claire’s slip. She had put it on that morning as she dressed quietly and quickly in the dark bedroom so as not to awaken Claire, who had been to a discotheque the night before with Alysse. She twisted her body at the waist in order to see over her shoulder.

  There was a large blood stain on the back of the slip.

  Felix looked away.

  Mamie dropped to the floor, sitting with stiff, bare legs straight before her, hands clenched tightly in her lap.

  He stood over her, the black dress dragging on the floor. “My dear,” he said quietly.

  She stared at his long, narrow feet in their thin brown leather shoes. There were bumps on the soles. He was wearing Italian driving slippers.

  He reached down to take her hand. There was no place where she could stand that would protect her from view. The blood from the aborted birth of Claire and Orval Nalag’s child was visible no matter where she put herself.

  “You are so sweet,” he said. “So mignon.”

  She felt such a relief in being comforted that she didn’t mind when he put his arm around her to draw her to her feet. She was so embarrassed that she was not paying close attention to him. He was very excited by her. He stroked her arms with the back of his fingers.

  “I am thinking to name this dress ‘Missionary’s Downfall’ in honor of you. But only if you promise to wear it in Chicago. Do you promise?”

  He could see that as she grew more composed, she was more conscious of the intimacy with which he touched her arms and the small of her back. He touched instead each of the coconut shell buttons on her turquoise bowling shirt, and then he let her pull away from him.

  “Do you promise?”

  Without turning her back to him, although she knew that he could still see the bloody slip clearly in the mirror behind her, she reached out awkwardly for her skirt. “Does this mean no more Miss Magda?” She smiled. The idea of escaping from the lingerie department made her very happy.

  “I saw you, months ago, on the elevator. Before we first met, before the fashion show. I have been thinking how you would look in my clothes.”

  “You have?” Mamie was surprised. She quickly pu
t on her skirt.

  “You belong in the world. The world should see you.” He took her hand and kissed it. “The world will see you.”

  Mamie laughed. He laughed, too, and allowed her to slip shyly out of the dressing room.

  It was the night of Alysse’s big dinner, what the girls had come to call the Claire-and-Mamie dinner, and Mamie, still exhilarated by her change in fortune that morning, found herself standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror. Claire’s slip soaked in cold brown water in the sink before her as Mamie tried to discover just what it was that Mr. Felix had seen in her. Despite studying herself from every possible angle, she couldn’t quite get it. The question is, she thought, not whether I agree with him, but whether I believe him.

  It is safe to say that Mamie had never thought of herself as someone whom the world deserved to see. It was one thing to incite blue-collar compliments at construction sites (“Yo, skinny, want to go round the world?”), but it was quite another to be discovered by Felix Villanueve. It meant, too, that she no longer had to run to Eighth Avenue to pick up Miss Magda’s corn removers, or to hide among the ostrich-feather bed jackets the torn, soiled clothes stolen overnight by Selena. She was astonished at her good luck.

  Claire spent the morning with Lydia, who had obligingly plaited Claire’s wet hair into fifty tiny braids. Claire, who had set aside an hour to unbraid her hair, was on the toilet seat, unweaving the thin, tight strands as Mamie held up yet another hand mirror to get a glimpse of herself from the side.

  “Very Pre-Raphaelite,” Mamie said.

  “Pre-what?”

  “Very pretty,” Mamie said. “Your hair. Not me.”

  “Lydia told me about a farmer in her village in Guatemala who had an old horse that he loved. He used to make love to the horse from behind, climbing up on the flatbed of an old pickup. Lydia used to watch them.”

  “I’m sorry you told me this.” Mamie was looking at her profile.

  “It gets better.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Lydia says the horse loved it.”

  Mamie looked at her. The loose hair fanned out in an aureola around Claire’s sweet little face.